With the Pompidou Closed, Brancusi's Paris Studio Takes Over MoMA's Sixth Floor
Constantin Brancusi's saws, chisels and calipers are in New York, laid out in a display a few rooms from sculptures that rarely leave Paris. Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio opened October 25, 2026, at The Museum of Modern Art and fills the museum's entire sixth floor through February 27, 2027.
The loans are possible because the studio's permanent home is shut. The Centre Pompidou houses the Atelier Brancusi, and its Paris building closed on September 22, 2025, for a renovation, with reopening planned for 2030. Most of the more than 130 works by Brancusi on view are lent by the Pompidou.
The studio at impasse Ronsin
Brancusi (1876 to 1957) was born in rural Romania, arrived in Paris in 1904 and in January 1916 settled at 8, impasse Ronsin, in the 15th arrondissement: three rooms with high ceilings and skylights at the end of a plant-lined gravel path. In 1927 No. 8 flooded and its floor gave way, and from January 1, 1928, Brancusi held the lease on No. 11, on the same impasse, transferred to him by Marcel Duchamp. He lived, worked and showed his sculptures there until his death.
After 1920 he increasingly withdrew from public exhibitions in France, preferring to receive visitors in the studio, where the sculptures stood as he arranged them. He carved directly in stone and wood with chisels, hatchets and saws, and became the main photographer of his own work, recording the changing studio in photographs and film. When he first saw the New York skyline in 1926, Brancusi called it his studio, a city of blocks and shapes to be shifted and juggled as the experiment grows and changes.
What is on the floor
The installation is largely chronological, tracing four decades at impasse Ronsin and the growing scale of the work, and many sculptures stand on Brancusi's original bases beside his carved wood furniture.
Endless Column III, carved in poplar before 1928, rises about 3 meters. A 1941 polished bronze Bird in Space stands on its onyx and limestone bases. Princess X (1915 to 1916), also in polished bronze, was withdrawn from the 1920 Salon des Indépendants over its suggestive form, then reinstated after a petition in the sculptor's support. All three come from the Pompidou.
Four works, King of Kings among them, come from uptown, lent by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
The curators
The exhibition is organized by guest curator Anne Umland and MoMA assistant curator Mia Matthias. "Brancusi often said he wanted his works to be experienced together, in relation to one another, and this exhibition will give New York audiences an exceptional opportunity to do exactly that," Umland says.
Hours and admission
The show is on Floor Six at 11 West 53 Street. Adult admission is $30 and covers all galleries, and MoMA stays open until 8:30 pm on Fridays, when New York State residents enter free from 5:30 pm.
